Even Leonardo DiCaprio has to be an Instagram husband

There was a meme doing the rounds on Twitter last week that really captured the mood of our time.

It was an image of a beautiful, island paradise – some guessed either Thailand or the Philippines – all white sand and sparkling azure water. In the photo three pairs of people were seen on the beach together. Each of the women was posing, reclining in the water, or sitting in the sand staring contemplatively out to sea.

The men (their boyfriends, husbands, partners or friends) were crouched down, cameras at the ready, snapping image after image for their better half’s social media feeds. “It’s 2018,” blogger Bryanboy tweeted. “I love that men have been reduced to this.

This is the future of mankind: Women, building our personal brands through artfully curated social media feeds. Men, answerable to our every whim, tasked with capturing our most beautiful selves. I don’t make the rules, I am merely obliged to obey them.

These days, everyone is an Instagram husband. Barack Obama has done it for wife Michelle, Jay-Z is tasked with snapping the flawless images of Beyonce that we see on her social media feeds.

And now Leonardo DiCaprio has seemingly befallen the same fate. The actor is currently on a yacht somewhere off the coast of Capri with his girlfriend of eight months, the Victoria’s Secret model Camila Morrone.

Previously, the yacht moored in St Tropez before it moseyed its way along the Cote D’Azur to Antibes where DiCaprio reportedly bought Morrone a new necklace. Ah, the life of the rich and famous, right?

While DiCaprio’s social media channels have remained stoicly silent through all this excess, Morrone has been posting on Instagram enough for the both of them. There are about a dozen snaps of Morrone in her new necklace, Morrone lounging on the deck of DiCaprio’s yacht, Morrone tanning, again, on that luxurious deck, Morrone laughing in a swimsuit, Morrone exploring Capri, Morrone smiling blissfully at the camera in the manner of someone who is currently not in an office, working, and on a yacht in Italy instead.

These are the kinds of envy-inducing pictures that social media was made for. But who took them? Though Morrone’s mother has been with them for part of the trip she doesn’t appear to be with them now. Is it possible that DiCaprio took them and that DiCaprio is, in fact, an Instagram husband?

There’s no shame in it, but there is something laughable about the idea of the Oscar-winning DiCaprio sighing audibly as Morronne asks him to just ‘Try one more, but this time on Portrait mode’.

As one Instagram husband told Stylist.co.uk, the gig is not for the faint-hearted. “I can get pretty self-conscious and I used to be paranoid about being filmed taking photos and ending up on a meme page,” he told Stylist.co.uk under the promise of anonymity. (No Instagram husbands were harmed in the making of this story.)

“But we’ve been doing this for quite a few years now, and get paid for it, so it’s a job and I can get on with it like any other job. It’s given me an excuse to learn how to use a DSLR and I enjoy the act of making the images – and my wife is hot AF so getting a good shot doesn’t take much work.”

Though he draws the line at anything dangerous or ridiculous, he says. “We don’t really do anything too out there, it’s mostly just temperature-related like my wife freezing her butt off at six in the morning on a bridge in Paris, in winter, wearing a summer dress,” he muses. “We’re not really ‘the shot at all costs’ people – if it’s stupid, dangerous or ridiculous it’s not worth it for us.”

I suspect DiCaprio is the same. You won’t be seeing paparazzi pictures of DiCaprio hanging off the side of his yacht brandishing an iPhone X while Morrone floats languidly in the water nearby.

But it’s still a nice thought that even though celebrities might have yachts and Oscars and Oprah on speed dial they still have to suffer in silence while they take photos of their girlfriends for social media.

It’s 2018 and this is what all men have been reduced to. Even Leonardo DiCaprio.